W.K. Stratton - The Wild Bunch: Sam Peckinpah, a Revolution in Hollywood, and the Making of a Legendary Film

For Brad Morelli and Gene Lehmann, my brothers from different parents, and remembering Bill Lehmann, Frank Parman, John Kelso, and Gentleman Jim Brewer

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

Backyard Brawl: Inside the Blood Feud Between Texas and Texas A & M

Chasing the Rodeo: On Wild Rides and Big Dreams, Broken Hearts and Broken Bones, and One Mans Search for the West

Floyd Patterson: The Fighting Life of Boxings Invisible Champion

Boxing Shadows

CONTENTS

We were born of risen apes, not fallen angels, and the apes were armed killers besides. And so what shall we wonder at? Our murders and massacres and missiles, and our irreconcilable regiments?

ROBERT ARDREY, AFRICAN GENESIS

Im not made to philosophize, I dont have the heart for it. My heart is more like a machine for making blood to be spilled in a knife fight.

CAMILO JOS CELA, LA FAMILIA DE PASCUAL DUARTE

The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.

D. H. LAWRENCE, STUDIES IN CLASSIC AMERICAN LITERATURE

Weve got to start thinking beyond our guns. Those days are closing fast.

WILLIAM HOLDEN AS PIKE BISHOP, THE WILD BUNCH

Photo by Bernie Abramson, courtesy of Tonio K.

The butchery occurred in the Qu ng Ngi Province village of Sn M on March 16, 1968. American soldiers of the Twenty-Third Infantry Division believed two hamlets harbored Viet Cong fighters in retreat after the Tet Offensive of two months earlier. The commander of the company sent in to root out Viet Cong told his men that all villagers who had not departed for the market by seven A.M . were likely Viet Cong or VC sympathizers and should be killed. Heeding orders to destroy anything walking, crawling, or growing, Charlie Company soldiers slaughtered men, women, children, and infants that morning. Some women were gang-raped before they were shot. Bodies were mutilated. All told, between 350 and 500 Vietnamese died in what became known in the United States as the M Lai Massacre. Meanwhile, in a Mexican town thousands of miles from Sn M, Sam Peckinpah was shooting a film that would confront the violence in the human soul to a degree unlike any movie before it while also dealing with many other weighty matters.

It was called The Wild Bunch .

In the years following World War II, Guthrie, Oklahoma, boasted four movie theaters. The Cimarron was a low-rent venue, mostly showing Westerns produced by Poverty Row studios. Kids packed it for Saturday-afternoon matinees. Up the block sat the State, a notch above the Cimarron in status. It showed its share of Westerns but also second-run features. As the towns first-run movie house, the Melba was Guthries most prestigious theater. Out by the airport was the Beacon Drive-In, its name inspired by the signal beam rotating above the runway.

Guthries population hovered for decades around the ten thousand mark. It may seem remarkable, from a twenty-first-century perspective, that a town that size could be home to four cinemas. Guthrie was, however, more rule than exception. Thousands of movie theaters operated in cities and towns across the United States at the midpoint of the twentieth century, providing entertainment and escapism to millions nightly.

But America was changing. Sharing the same Guthrie streets with the theaters were furniture and appliance stores. Facing outward from their display windows were console televisions showing programming from Oklahoma City stations. Guthries farmers, stockmen, oil-field roughnecks, housewives, and furniture-factory workers gathered in front of the plate glass to stare at the fuzzy black-and-white images. It is safe to assume that no one in Guthrie owned a TV at the end of the war. By the time I was born there ten years later, there were more homes with a television than without. The effect on Guthries cinemas was, well, dramatic. The Cimarron and the State disappeared, leaving just the Melba and the Beacon Drive-In.

It was at the Beacon that I discovered the movies.

Money never ran deep for my family. This was especially true early on, when the five of us lived in a ten-by-fifty-foot trailer house, and every dime had to be carefully accounted for. The Beacon allowed my parents to load my stepbrothers and me into the Chevy station wagon and enjoy an evening out for a couple of bucks. For that, the whole family gained admission to the drive-in with enough change left over to buy popcorn and RC Colas at the concession stand. There were downsides, though. The Oklahoma nights typically were clammy and hot during summer, leaving moviegoers craving the air-conditioning of an indoor theater such as the Melba. The images on the screen usually seemed to be slightly out of focus. Sometimes the projectionist, whose day job was running the towns icehouse, fell asleep, and someone would have to go rouse him when it was time to change reels. Such shortcomings paled against the wonders projected on that giant screen: previews of coming attractions, newsreels, cartoons, features, sometimes a double feature. Even viewed from a backseat through a bug-spattered windshield, movies at the Beacon were grander than anything on TV.